Chapter 55

As the sun passed directly overhead, Connor lied to himself that it was cooling. A quick glance at his pocket computer would be enough to confirm the temperature, but it would also mean looking at the stop watch he’d kicked off when he’d started the descent down the side of the butte. He didn’t need to see that to know they were running behind.

Maybe thirty meters ahead, Kalpana stuck her head out from the cover of a tree. She signed that there was movement, confirming the signal she’d sent over the team combat integration system.

Three red forms moved somewhere ahead of her on Connor’s helmet AR overlay. Whatever they were, their scent was like an intensified musk version of the terrarium rot smell.

And there was a soft, easily overlooked clicking and chattering sound coming from the same direction as the smell, barely louder than the sound of his boots on the soft loam that made up the forest floor.

He signaled Lem to take cover behind a tree, then edged up to the scout’s position.

Without a word, she handed him her sniper rifle, which synced with his combat integration system and pulled him toward the closest of the things.

It was a variation on the thing they’d seen at the original landing site: almost reptilian, a blue-green that was black until the sunlight hit it, with a powerful set of lower legs and a dangerous looking set of clawed middle legs.

Those upper limbs would probably grip a target while the middle ones tore it to pieces.

Or maybe it would balance on its long, thick tail and come up with the wickedly clawed bottom legs and gut the target.

But the teeth that showed when the skin peeled back on the long, reptilian head…

There were so many ways it could kill.

He returned the rifle to her, and she pointed the way back.

They didn’t have a choice, apparently.

Fifty meters back, she set her weapon against a rock, yanked her helmet off and undid her armor, then pulled her shirt off and wrung sweat from it. She poured water from her canteen over her face, then took a drink. Small scars crisscrossed her chest and shoulders, paler than her flesh.

Lem clambered up a mound of the same sort of honeycombed rock they’d found when they’d crashed and squatted, searching the woods.

Connor did as Kalpana had, but it didn’t provide much relief from the misery. He checked the stopwatch. Four hours, twelve minutes.

The scout took another drink, then put her canteen away. “How bad?”

“Forty minutes behind schedule.”

“You love your schedules.”

“I don’t want to be out here in the dark.”

“Gonna be in the dark at some point. That’s a long haul.”

“We don’t need to reach this site. I just want eyes on it.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Not gonna like what you see.”

He wasn’t sure she was flirting again, but he looked away, scanning the trees.

At least these were closer to what he’d consider real trees. They didn’t seem connected to a massive sheet of flesh, although they did have an odd root system that moved and pulsed like arteries and veins. Rather than huge bird parasites and bark-like insects sucking from the trunk, there were fluorescent red leech-like things slithering among the network of roots.

Evolution had created another strange ecosphere.

Connor wrung out his T-shirt again, then shook it hard. “What do you think about those things?

“The lizards?” It sounded like Kalpana shook out her shirt, too. “Packs.”

“You think they hunt in groups that small?”

“That’s, what, the fourth time we’ve run into them? Never more than five.”

“Mostly operating on optics, audio, scent?”

“Can’t see any obvious sensory organs.”

“But every predator has some sort of sensory organs, and they’re built like predators.”

“I doubt it’s scent. We’ve been upwind of the ones we ran into earlier.”

“Unless they’re territorial.”

“Yeah.” She put a hand on his back. “Like Selen?”

Connor spun around. The scout stepped closer. “Kalpana—”

“This place is scary as—”

“—we can’t do anything—”

“—and it gets me—”

He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Kalpana!”

She blinked, shook her head, then backed away. “Sorry.”

“We’re all under stress.”

The scout pulled her shirt on. “I though after you and Selen argued—”

“It wasn’t an argument.”

“Yelling’s usually part of an argument.”

“We had a disagreement.”

“Sure. You ever kick her out, we can have a disagreement like that.”

He blushed. “It’s not like that.”

“It can be. That’s all I’m saying.”

Connor pulled his shirt and armor on, then secured his helmet. Maybe it wasn’t the stress that was getting to the quiet sniper after all. “What next?”

She pulled her computer out and slid a finger over the display. On his AR heads-up display, a new trail ran off the course she’d originally set. “About fifty meters this way, then we try again.”

Lem waved wildly and pointed back the way they’d come.

Kalpana snapped her teeth at Connor. “Maybe they can sense excitement.”

She giggled, then jogged along the path she’d set.

The android jumped down from the mound, scraped blue goo from his soles on the loam, and stared after her retreating form. “That was not a normal interaction, I believe.”

“Not at all.”

“Hm.”

Connor hurried after the scout, and Lem followed. “Lem, let’s keep that to ourselves.”

“Of course. Is this related to Selen’s decision to alienate Rudy?”

“You heard us talking?”

“I think anything within a kilometer of the ship heard you talking.”

“Sorry.” Connor would have to do a better job avoiding conflict in open spaces. Selen was…

She hadn’t been like that before—blowing up suddenly, shouting.

Stress.

Lem jogged in silence for a bit, then looked back. “Those creatures showed no sign of sniffing or other reactions.”

“Maybe they heard us.”

“Perhaps.” The android glanced down at the weapon he carried. “You said Rudy is the glue. By that, you mean he holds the team together?”

“He’s great at discipline and providing guidance.” Rudy would have nipped Kalpana’s behavior in the bud. Maybe he had in the past, keeping it out of Connor’s awareness.

“He was opposed to me being on the recon mission when Dr. Litvinenko died.”

“I know.”

For a moment, Connor was on the perimeter again, walking it exactly as he should have—listening in the dark and scanning the area around the camp for movement or anything out of the ordinary.

Something had slowed him on that walk: a sound, a flash of movement, a smell.

He couldn’t recall now what it was, but that sensation was in his head again now: squatting behind a bush, straining to hear or see the source.

And a few minutes behind his schedule, he’d shut off his stopwatch and returned to the tent where the doctor was sleeping.

But the old man was dead, eyes open in pain.

Something grabbed Connor’s arm, and he snapped out of the memory.

Lem pointed ahead. “I believe Kalpana is signaling.”

“Thanks.”

Connor had no idea how long he’d been caught up in reliving that night, but he was sweating hard again, and his breath was short.

Ahead, Kalpana waved him forward. There weren’t any threats on the overlay.

When he squatted behind her, she handed him the rifle again. This time, she guided him to the target manually, and she let her hand drift over his before pulling away.

She leaned in close to his ear, breath hot. “That what you wanted?”

It was. A few kilometers ahead, the trees thinned. Beyond that, the land sloped down, and the trees were replaced by low scrub or…something. Then the scrub was replaced by a heavy layer of moss or something, and that was covered by ruins.

Gray and white stone pillars, blockish structures that rose no higher than four or five meters, slabs broken into segments…

And in the center of all that, a pit that disappeared in darkness.

Their target. They’d found their path. The mission was a go.